August 17

I can't believe how nice August has been. It seems that July and August got mixed up on their timing. I'm not going to complain, though. If we had to go through that hot-as-blazes stretch to get to this, I'd do it every time. We had a really nice rain the other night - 2 inches. I think if we got another decent rain in the next week or so, we would be done irrigating corn. We haven't had to irrigate much, which is nice. It saves us money, and allows me to actually go out and do things, so I'm headed to the St. Louis area this weekend with some friends.

Dad and I replaced some bearings on the deck of my new (to me) mower yesterday, I put some new blades on, and away we went. The belt on the deck is bad, so the blades were slipping and two of them were hitting each other, so now I need a new deck belt. Need a new mule drive belt, too. And it needs a tune-up, but hey, it's 40 years old. What do you expect?

One of these days, I'm going to have a special edition of the blog, which will focus on the old tractors I would like to own someday. It's not really a greed thing. I probably won't ever own any of them, matter of fact. I just love some of the old brutes, and I respect the engineers that developed them, and the guys that ran them. I romanticize a lot, because I'm sure disking in an open station tractor wasn't a lot of fun, but it had to be better than using horses or mules. Anyhow, here's a preview. If you ever find an Allis Chalmers D21, go ahead an buy it for me, and I'll pay you back.